Sharing

I've learned a thing or two over the years when working as a developer. I love sharing what I've learned and use this site for that.

The difference between knowledge and wisdom is experience.

I choose a skill I want to be good at, do the research and will get my hands dirty while experimenting to uncover its principles. To be able to write or teach I need real experience.

Career

It started back in 1999 when I got involved in a startup which listed all available daily menus of the local restaurants. The programming languages I learned during my business information technology study wasn't proficient and I taught myself PHP. My lack of architecture skills forced me to be inventive and I used a customized news publishing platform for it.

That news publishing platform was my first open source experience and I started making contributions. After a while it got me my first lead developer position.

I always had plenty of work offered via my network which got me started as a freelance developer. I started with html sites, WordPress sites and plugins. Eventually I got bigger jobs to build sites and even an auction platform from scratch for which I used CodeIgnitor, Symfony and Laminas (FKA Zend Framework).

Server maintenance, deployments and setting up CI is something I learned and loved as well and I have extended my knowledge with JavaScript frameworks like VueJS and AngularJS.

During my freelance time, I've worked alone and in teams as a developer, team lead and architect.

In 2019 I got tired of chasing clients for payments and wanted to work in a bigger company. Januari 2020 I started as a Senior Software Engineer at ottonova. Early 2021 I got the role as a team lead. It means less programming but more of the other things I like to do like management and even building a new team from scratch in 2022. Even tough the official title is team lead software engineering, I do a lot more in the area of a software architect like: managing projects, talking to clients, collaborate with other teams, code reviews, documentation and even troubleshooting from time to time.

Say hello

Say hello on Twitter, follow me on Instagram or check our my projects on GitHub.